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Flexible Photo Organization Software?
Matthew Wecksell asks: "Several years after getting a digital camera, I find myself with far too many pictures to keep track of, with multiple folders titled 'At the Beach' and so on. Picassa will not let me assign multiple labels to a picture and then search against those labels the way iTunes will with my music (eg: Show me all pictures with '"Grandma Foo" and not "Grandma Bar"' to find pics that have just one of my two grandmothers). Also, I'd like to find a solution that lets me export the meta data or keep it in the picture files, not a proprietary database, so that in ten or twenty years, I can use another program on another platform and still have useful tags assigned to my pictures that I'm taking today — I have no interest in re-tagging my pics. Has anyone found a good solution to the picture organization problem? Is there any standard 'ID3' style for putting metadata into an EXIF header?"
I'll be watching this thread closely, I made the mistake of putting of my my pictures in iPhoto (which is a fine program otherwise) and I find I am unable to get out of it. The pictures are categorized nicely in directories but the tags and such are not transferable to any other program as far as I can tell. I would really like to move to F-Spot but I don't feel like duplicating hours of work on some 3000 pictures.
Finkployd
I love the UI on Picassa, but I am finding that it has some shortcomings.
For example, I have all my pictures on one network share. On desktop PC "A" I arrange my pictures into albums using labels. on Desktop PC "B", you have to repeat this work. A central (or even just exportable) database of this would be hands.
Along with multiple labels
and possibility of heirarchical albums structure.
KPhotoAlbum (previously called KimDaBa) is pretty good for free software. You can make custom tags, search with either/or/not/and logic, and it's pretty easy to use. One bad thing is that (in the older version I have anyways) it slows down a lot when you have 10,000+ photos in it. It stores its metadata in an XML file that you can backup so you don't lose your library. I've used it for about a year, until I moved over to an iMac+iPhoto.
http://kphotoalbum.org/
Vote for global prefs bug
We need a file structure that understands the data upon it.
Files should be managed based on metadata.
I believe that Photoshop Elements 4 stores the tag data in the photo headers. In general, PSE4 on Windows is a really good photo organiser, I prefer it to iPhoto in fact.
" Is there any standard 'ID3' style for putting metadata into an EXIF header?"
Yes, yes, yes.
It's called IPTC. I think Picasa uses them, and jbrout too.
Too much photo management software doesn't use this standard, that sucks.
I am currently using http://www.digitalriver.com/v2.0-img/operations/ac dsys/html/060926/acdsee_1.html ( ACDSee Photo Manager ) and have found that it works very well. It's quick to load and has some great features. It does, however, take some getting used to.
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion...
Interestingly enough, I just stopped hacking on an application that will hopefully solve a lot of these problems just this minute to start reading slashdot. I actually just started coding on this project a couple of days ago, so it doesn't do a lot right now, but in a couple of days it should have at least the rudimentary features you are looking for (storage of tags, searching) and will hopefully be a bit usable.
You can check out the code here if you want:
http://code.google.com/p/mediabrowser/
The project is written in C++ with Gtkmm, you'll have to compile it yourself since I haven't built any packages or anything.
Hope that helps.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Let me guess, your grandfathers names are 'widget' and 'gizmo' right ?
Why, yes, and they're described in section 4.6 of the EXIF specification.
Flickr has the nice advantage of getting them off of your drive and making them painfully easy to feed/share/etc. and the tagging isn't "that" bad. However, it only lets you have 3 "sets" in free mode, which makes it difficult unless you use really broad categories. I produce so many pictures that the bandwidth is a real problem for me, and probably will be until I bite the bullet and buy a ton of throughput for a month or two ("available" space is measured on flickr in throughput, so a few big pictures all at once and you're done for the month).
stuff |
If you like everything else about Picasa just request the features you want to be added. I'm sure it'll come along eventually and you won't have to move all your images again.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I use iPhoto and besides albums I can assign keywords to the pictures making it easy to search by keyword. If iPhoto is not enough then Aperature is supposed to provide even more so I assume it would have better organizational stuff too.
Of course, both require a Mac.
But I love iPhoto. All my photos have names, ratings, and a set a keywords with everything from file type to portrait/landscape, to camera model and lens (I, of course, had to set all these).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
If you were using a Mac, I'd suggest Aperture...
But since you mentioned Picassa, I'll assume you are using Windows. You may want to look at Lightroom, you can organize photos and attach keywords which you can then search on. Lightroom will generate XMP files alongside images, which hold all your metadata (Aperture can do the same). Lightroom also stores these keywords inside a local database, making search very fast.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been looking for the same thing, and, at least in the Mac world, it ain't out there. The closest I've found is Shoebox, which has a great hierarchical tagging system, but it's still single-user. And it's been a little buggy for me.
Big bonus for Shoebox, though, is the hierarchical tags -- I can't believe how far we've gone with all sorts of folksonomy tagging systems, but virtually nobody's using a hierarchy of tags. Keeping these flat, especially if you want to start organizing and grouping by family, is just unusable after a 25-50 tags or so. With Shoebox's system, you can set things up like "John's Family" with John, his wife, and all kids as sub tags. Then, if, say, "Tim" (John's oldest son) marries "Jane", create "Tim's Family" as a sub to John's family, or even as a sub to Tim, and you can use aliases to have Tim show up in both places. It's hard to explain without pictures, but trust me, it's really very flexible.
Anyway, the downsides:
* Again, a little buggy / flaky
* Proprietary: Can't export the data, though you can export the tag hierarchy (just not the associations between tags and the photos, at least not that I've found)
* Single-user: It's licensed for a single userid on a single CPU, so my wife can't even access it on the same box, let alone me or her on any other box in the house.
If we could get the organizational abilities of Shoebox (or a similar hierarchical tag system) in a client-server model, running on a linux server with clients on windows, mac, or whatever, then I think I'd have a personal winner. Bonus points if it speaks DPAP so iPhoto can read the libraries (to make printing, editing, etc., easier). Oh, and it'd have to have an easy way to store/track multiple versions of a photo, for when you crop, clean out redeye, etc.
I'm "this close" to starting to hack something together myself, but simply have no time with all the other unfinished projects in my life (not to mention my son). At least I should write up a more careful specifications document and post it on a blog somewhere, for someone who actually has time to start hacking at. Really, the back-end DB stuff is trivial, you just need a decent front end. And a web interface just wouldn't be all that usable for huge collections, either. (otherwise, I'd recommend giving Zoph a look, as it's got a lot of the DB stuff but it's 100% web based).
Unfortunately is windows only, but is full of features.
It has the possibility of multiple categories assignment and the categories can be organized in hierarchical mode. You can even assign keywords. Categories and keywords (with all the file metadata) can be used for searching images, for example you can do the search you cite but you can put even restrinction on file size, resolution and others attribute.
It has two ways of decoupling the db data from the program : the first is using IPTC (it can export categories and keyword to IPTC), the second is using a XML export function wich will export all the db info in a documented XML format.
It has even batch processing and a scripting engine (in Real Basic) wich can access all the program classes. ( http://photools.com/ )
I used to use a simple script to I wrote to create an index.html page from a directory of photos. This worked surprisingly well; but then I discovered digikam, and now I wouldn't look back.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Windows Vista Photo Gallery? http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/for home/gallery.mspx#more
Layne
I have a large collection of photos I've taken over about 6 years.
. jpg
My method is probably not for everyone, but it's just a simple way of storing them.
I have a directory structure as follows:
photos/2006/0101-nakedlinuxchix0rz/*.jpg
photos/2006/0428-steveballmertakingitupthebummy/*
so bascially: photos///*.files
It's not software, but I prefer it because it's not dependant on a software package, and with grep or start -> find it's rather easy to locate my photos.
Just a thought, it probably sucks but it works for me.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Your Grandmother's names are Foo and Bar?!
That is so incredibly cool!
It sounds like what you really need is a basic IPTC editor. That way all the metadata you associate with the file stays with the file wherever it goes. If you're using a mac and have $300 you aren't terribly good friends with, you could buy Aperture. It has a really nice system for assigning IPTC fields in batches, and you can also set up hierarchies of IPTC keywords. (Think tags, but IPTC keywords have been in use a long time with the photo industry, and they call them IPTC keywords) Oh and Aperture does loads of other stuff. Its overkill if you don't shoot in RAW mode and do some post-processing. If you're talking about snapshots here, I would just find a simple tool for whatever you platform of choice is to let you edit IPTC headers. Get them all labeled first, then worry about management software in another year or so once you have finished all the labeling.
Oh and try not to take any pictures in the meantime. You'll only make more work for yourself. Say hi to the Granmas for me!
I have been using Adobe Photoshop Album for the past year or so and have found it to be great. It's tag based, and will even let you create dynamic collections based on tags. It's like a standing search.
.anacron
Currently have over 15,000 photos in there and performance doesn't seem to be an issue.
The only gripe I have is that it doesn't (yet) support RAW photos. Hopefully they'll change that in the next release.
Actually, EXIF information is pretty much just camera settings, dates, geotagging, and the like. IPTC is the standard used by newspapers, news agencies, and more. This information can be embedded onto many images, jpeg, tiff, etc. This allows captions, locations, credits, bylines, and more. You can use any of the following software http://www.iptc.org/photometadata/softwaresupportl ist1.php that is officially sanctioned by IPTC standard. My favorite is Picasa for adding captions, because you can simply use the arrow keys to go through images, and then just type a caption whenever you see fit. However there are better applications that allow you to batch edit all IPTC data. A good free app is XnView http://perso.orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/endownloadw in32.html , although there are others out there. However, nothing is a good substitute for dating and naming images properly. For organizational purposes, make a naming scheme for yourself that works. Date folders in a YYYY-MM-DD format with perhaps a description after that, but be careful not to use people's names on the folder because a search for that person will come up with folders of stuff instead of just the pictures that you want. A better solution is to type people's names that are in the picture into the keywords part of the IPTC data. For naming files, use the same dating scheme, and then simply add the photographer's initials, a category, or whatever else you see fit. hope this helps
I just use folders for events or periods of time, and the folder contains the date in a standard form; e.g. 2006-summer, 200607-china, 20060504-phoenix-zoo, etc. Usually I can remember approximately when a picture was taken.
But yeah EXIF tags have a comment field so why don't you just put a sequence of keywords in there (or whole sentences if you like) and then use a full-text search engine? I've had good luck with Swish++ to search other kinds of documents (MP3 metadata, Word docs, PDFs, plain text, HTML, C source files, etc.) It can be extended with filters based on MIME type to extract keywords from each kind of document that it finds.
Also see this regarding how to extract dates/times from EXIF files and incorporate them into the filename.
Exifdater reads date EXIF data from a jpg file, and renames the file according to the pattern that you specify in the command parameters. It can incorporate the original filename in the new filename. You can then organize your photos according to date, simply using your filesystem. This way you are not locked into any database format.
Here is a script that I wrote to run exifdater with my favourite parameters:
So if I use the above script on a file originally named IMG_005.jpg, it renames it 2006-11-21.IMG_005.jpg
The exifdater page also has a link to a public domain utility called jhead. I haven't used it yet, but it appears to have more features than exifdater, including editing the JPEG header comments.
I dealt with this a couple of years ago by adopting an external form for descriptions and a picture naming convention. See the screed/tirade below :-)
I wrote a couple of scripts for bulk-importing lots of files and started a windows GUI editor to encourage family to adopt it, but got distracted. I have just been doing everything with emacs in the meantime.
==
== Photo Description Tools
==
Digital photos are wonderful, but for all of their megapixels they lack the simple feature of prints -- you can't write on the back of them.
On the surface, it seems simple enough. When I take a picture of Uncle Harvey, the JPEG file is one million bytes in size. You would think that it wouldn't be difficult to add in the twelve extra bytes for the string "Uncle Harvey".
The problem is that everyone wants to do it differently. In what has become computing industry standard practice, each vendor wants to lock you into their private database for notes, and when the technology or business environment changes, you lose everything.
In the past year, I have shot many photos, and since I can't jot notes on the back, have forgotten many details about the subjects. I can't wait another few years for a winner to emerge before recording this information. I need to capture it now!
I keep my physical photos for 30-40 years, and want to keep my digital photos for just as long. If you believe that your current solution is going to survive that long, good for you. I don't, and this is my open way of saving the information in a way that will survive for many years and hopefully outlast the stupid vendor contests.
That data belongs to you! Don't let someone else lock it up!
These protocols were written to scratch this particular itch. The following are
my design goals:
- Let me capture BASIC information about the photos
- Store the master copy of the information in a separate file,
so that we never lose it if some vendor decides to strip
things from the picture file.
- Store the master copy in an open format so that I can write
tools against it or even just edit it with a text editor
and never be held hostage to a particular tool.
- Copy the info into the file multiple times in all the competing
protocols, so that it will be visible in whatever system
you happen to be using.
In order to make this happen, I have defined two specs that will
govern the tools I write. If it other people and projects want to
adopt them too, so much the better.
The first is the pixtag file format for picture descriptions. This is
simple enough to write by hand with notepad.exe or emacs (I am doing a
lot of this while building my tools), but structured enough for tools
to easily read and manage.
The second is a naming convention for files. You can use pixtag
regardless of what you name your image files, but if you plan on
keeping your pictures for decades, you better use something better
than the IMG_1234 that comes out of your camera. Plus, you better
plan on mixing those files with ones from other people, scans of
traditional prints, and so on.
PIXTAG DESCRIPTION FILE
There is some flexibility in how the master file is handled. In most
cases, I expect that there will be one file with all of the pictures a
person has, or one file per directory (what I do) However, some people
may want to partitioning files by year, or overachievers may even load
everything into a mysql database.
I suggest the pixtag file extension for the master files. So for a
single file it might look like:
loffredo.pixtag
For multiple years or directories it might look like
196x_loffredo.pixtag
I use firehand technologies ember. there is a free version too.
http://www.firehand.com/Ember/index.html
...the tags and such are not transferable to any other program as far as I can tell.
I know this probably isn't helpful, but a program to export this kind of information from iPhoto should be relatively easy to write, thanks to Spotlight. iPhoto does kind of magic to associate metadata from it's database with files in the library. If you inspect (using mdls) the metadata on an image in the library and compare it to the same image copied out of the library, you can see that the library image has a number of keys that the other doesn't (and vice-versa). Of interest are kMDItemKeywords and kMDItemStarRating. A smart programmer could slurp this metadata from Spotlight and not have to reverse-engineer the iPhoto database or parse iPhoto's AlbumData.xml (which is where Spotlight gets the info.) Getting it into another program is an exercise for the reader, but there are a number of different ways.
I'd do this myself except that...well...I don't really have an excuse. Dang.
I don't know what platform you're on, but if you're on a Unix system, I *highly* recommend KPhotoAlbum (previously called KimDaBa).
Some of its features:
If you're going to try KPA, I highly recommend getting an SVN version, or waiting a few weeks for the next release. It's a very significant upgrade over the last release and it's been in feature freeze for a while so it's very solid.
One of the things the question asked about was embedding the tags in the images, and if there was a standard way to do that. There is, it's called IPTC, and KPA supports loading tags from IPTC data. It doesn't support writing tags to IPTC, for two reasons:
Note also that there are some tools out there that only store the metadata in IPTC
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I ran into this problem a few years ago, and so started work on my own project which I now use to keep my collection of 8500+ photos organised. Categories (tags/labels/...) are arranged in a tree, and are assigned to photos.
So have a look at http://photolibrary.sourceforge.net/ (or http://sourceforge.net/projects/photolibrary)
The rdf stuff feels like overkill, but overall, lots of places and things to look at:
. html#software
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/09/photo
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It's realtively inexpensive at $60, and the latest version was perhaps a little slow to market.... BUT!
...) and you can then tag all your photos with as many tags as you want.
http://photools.com/
IMatch is exactly what you're looking for. It can import/export IPTC data, EXIF data, and there's a scripting language that you could use to import/export your own database. Lots of tagging options (I have my family tree, literally as a tree of tags, locations, events,
I'm making this brief since I'm busy, but you can try out the free trial. That's what I did before buying it and the trial is what convinced me to go this route rather than the pile of other options I had tried that were either overpriced for my needs, or didn't meet my needs at all.
You can attach onewordonly IPTC keywords to photos in Picasa, just use CTRL-K.
The IPTC keywords are standard metadata attached to the photo, other software can read them - Flickr will read IPTC keywords in uploaded photos and turn them into tags.
I've had good luck with http://www.digikam.org/
iViewMedia Pro is the ticket. Extremely scalable, extremely versatile. Used by publishers to organize thousands of photos. Mac/PC.
http://www.iview-multimedia.com/
ed
I use XnView. It's available for many platforms. It's free. It's small and fast. It supports many many file formats. It also seems like it would fit your needs with portable database for image descriptions.
It creates descript.ion files for every directory you browse through, a format used in the days of 4DOS I believe. They're simple text files placed in the same location as your files. When you burn a folder to CD, the meta data is also burned along thanks to the descript.ion file. And since they're text files, you could easily make a small script to convert them to XML for any other use.
I've been using it for some years now because of the descript.ion files alone but there are many other worthwhile features such as a scriptable web gallery creator and the choice of a few methods for resampling images.
I've got a 80G image library that I manage for my company. Thumbsplus has proven to be a pretty good solution, although I admit to not using the query function very much.
As TP asks how you want your database created (proprietory or MSAccess compatible), you can run your own querys outside of TP if you wish. Lots of metadata tagging features too.
It's not that expensive ($49 for Std 1 user license; $89 for Pro, which has more database functionality), and higher licenses allow for multiple concurrent users.
http://www.cerious.com/ (no, I don't work for them. Just a happy user)
Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high...
Personally, I gave up using X photo organization software, because there was always a better one around the corner and making the switch was a pain in the **s. Now I'm uploading all my photos to Gallery2 php/sql -web application. It has more features then I need, is developed actively and it is a handy way to share photos to people or use it as a backend for website image storage. You can also limit the access to photos with powerful account based permission system.
It allows for multiple tags on pictures, organized how you want. (eg. All pictures that contain me or my dog at the lake). Very easy to use. My favorite part about it is that it doesn't touch your directory structure and doesn't change any file names. The only thing I'm not sure about is how exportable the tags and other information is... Still, I think it's going to be the closest thing you find to what you're looking for.
It's not been updated for a while (four years and counting), but I've yet to find something that surpasses Exifer for Windows in both being powerful and usable.
/
http://www.friedemann-schmidt.com/software/exifer
In a time long ago, before iTunes/Amarok, I used symlinks to categorize my MP3 files. I had a shell script that retrieved the ID3 fields and used the field values to create symlinks. There was a directory for each value of each ID3 field and any files containing those ID3 values had a symlink from that directory to the real file. So 'Rolling Stones - Paint It Black.mp3' would have a symlink from each of /mp3/genres/rock, /mp3/years/1969, and /mp3/artists/rollingstones.
Something similar could work for your photos, but you'd have a bit more manual work.
I just wrote my own AJAX Online Photo Storage.. It stores everything in a mysql database, from the tags to the binary data. Images are stored in 3 versions: thumbnail, webnail (definable size such as 800x600), and the original. With a host like dreamhost that provides me 200 GB I've moved my entire collection online in this system. You can import entire folders of photos with a set of tags/album, or upload multiple files at once.
I've setup a demo with some of my pics for you guys to check out:
http://imagedemo.farleyfamily.net/
Feel free to edit/add/delete photos.. Notice that in the gallery view you can click-in and edit tags/descs/albums on-the-fly (very slick).
If you're interested in the source: matt@farleyfamily.net
I don't want to use a piece of software to do this, so I just create directories. The first part of the directory's name is the date: 20061121 The second part of the directory's name is the person who took the picture (some of the pictures that I have were taken by someone else): john The third part of the directory's name is a keyword of the event: grandma-birthday. And an example of a full name is: 20061121.john.grandma-birthday; I use dots for seperators, but that is just a matter of preferance. I also place a simple text file inside the directory for comments. I keep adding those directorys in another big directory called "pictures". When the "pictures" directory gets around 4.5GB, I write it in a DVD and put a label on it. Simple, efficient, and cross-platform :-P
It all depends on what you really want, and need.
In my case -- I needed remote network access, but I also wanted to be in full control of my data. I primarily wanted a full-on repository to hold *everything*, with configurable views for different people (and/or the general public). I didn't want to have to manually generate web galleries and manage all of that independently.
After some casting about, I ended up settling on Photo Organizer. It's fully database-driven (PostgreSQL) and thus scales quite well -- It was designed to be, first and foremost, a photographer's primary image repository. It has the usual assortment of tagging, folders, albums (aka views), is fully multi-user with permissions, etc etc.. it's also web-driven (PHP), so you don't have to be sitting at a single PC to do any work.
So I started using it, and to make a long story short I contributed so much to it that I ended up taking over maintainership, which makes this a bit of a self-plug.
It also supports a full export of all stored metadata, so you have direct control over all of your valuable metadata.
It's not perfect, naturally, and its non-native nature means that fancy UIs just aren't possible, but it's designed to be an image repository, not an image editor...
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
I've been following this subject for years and also wrote my thoughts on the subject. My conclusion is the same: the meta keywords MUST be kept inside the EXIF fields of the images, alternatively in the path/filename info.
The hitch ? No program can handle them properly: the programs that can put the keywords in the EXIF are bugged, crash often (taking the entire Windows Explorer with them, requiring a reboot in XP), have shitty UIR, overwrite other EXIF fields, drop color profiles or recompress the JPEG data (absolute no-no); the programs that should read the fields to extract the content for quick search are just too slow or re-import it into complex systems. I want to keep the two things SEPARATE, and for good reasons.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I've read good things about F-Spot too.
But for user awareness I'd like to point out that F-Spot is developed using Mono. You of course, can make your own decision about whether you are comfortable with this dependency.
Buy it, steal it, or borrow it ... but love it. It's right up your alley with the tagging business.
Any pointers greatly appreciated.
Note that IPTC supports practically only ASCII. Some software can read latin1 (ISO8859-1) characters from some IPTC fields, but that's it. The spec defines a (rather cryptic) method for indicating the character set used, including UTF-8, but there are no known applications that use it.
So, for non-English speaking users, IPTC is useless. XMP, on the other hand, uses UTF-8 natively.
I have used JBrout for a while. It is written in Python and writes tags as IPTC keywords in the picture.
What I would really love, would kill for, is a (yup, here's the kicker) free Controlled Vocabulary list I could utilise, either flat or ideally hierarchical.
Do you mean like multiple pre-populated tag hierarchies that you can use in your favorite application? I know that Shoebox has some you can download (replace the "shoebox://" with "http://" and you can get the xml files), both created by kavasoft and some created by users. They're a little oddly structured at first, but can be figured out pretty easily. Not sure about reuse rules, though. Is there a taxonomy wiki, maybe, that you can borrow from?
Submitter asked for a tagging solution like ID3 - got many results for IPTC. Which I didn't know about, and which sounds great for what it is. In particular, if you're going to email files around and then need to be able to find the source FROM the image file, an in-file tag like this is what you want - and I'm sure why newspapers use it.
But for the INTENT you talked about - managing and searching for your photos - it's all wrong unless your system 100% caches it - which for YOUR purposes is a lot like not using it. You do NOT want to have to open every single image file on every single filesystem to search for something, especially to do complex searches. Furthermore, since your search information is MUCH smaller than the images, you want to be able to search through tags of images that you don't currently have. (eg, that aren't mounted or are unplugged)
(Note that if you search a bunch of files by filename you only open the fs chunks for each DIRECTORY, not for _any_ files.)
This is doubly true if your tagging format is multiple-file aware, and you can tell it that you have two copies of the same files on different drives and that it should never return two results for them.
XML is probably a good enough solution for your purposes, which is why I posted this below one talking about how KPhotoAlbum is XML based.
For a multiple simultaneous write situation, flat file XML is simply not enough and you'll need a DB (and with some indicies you'll get MUCH better search speed) - but you can always export backups to XML.
Now you've gone and made me think we should be making such software.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
If you aren't stickler for using GPLd software I'd second recommending Lightroom. It's a free beta right now and has a lot of useful features like excellent camera raw tools, and excellent cropping to standard print sizes. It also has comprehensive tone and color controls as well as the tagging features you are looking for. Of course being propitiatory software you'll have to buy it for probably 200+ dollars when it comes out of beta, or head to your local torrent. Oops did I say that? Silly me, never do anything illegal or that your mommy wouldn't' approve, of EVER.
Mac or Windows.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
One equivalent to ID3 for Jpegs is a standard put out by International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), known as the IPTC Information Interchange Model. (But people often call them IPTC tags.)
We use IPTCExt, which adds IPTC tabs to the file properties in Windows Explorer, and a quick google will find other programs that can edit them.
This suggests that Photoshop Elements 3 fully supports these IPTC tags. It's also well supported by ImageWalker.
XML is probably a good enough solution for your purposes, which is why I posted this below one talking about how KPhotoAlbum is XML based. For a multiple simultaneous write situation, flat file XML is simply not enough and you'll need a DB (and with some indicies you'll get MUCH better search speed) - but you can always export backups to XML.
As I mentioned in the post you responded to, soon that will be XML-based or SQL-based. The SQL stuff works now, but it's still quite alpha.
Now you've gone and made me think we should be making such software.
I think we (using the word in its most general sense) are.
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>>>soon that will be XML-based or SQL-based
Sure, but someone had mentioned they didn't want a SQL solution because they were concerned about being able to use it much longer.
>>>I think we (using the word in its most general sense) are.
I meant it in a less general sense.
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